Rob Edelman: Hot Docs

I’ve said it before and I certainly will say it again: These days, an endless number of new documentaries examine a rainbow of subjects. Here are a few just-released or about-to-be-released-to-home-entertainment documentaries that have especially intrigued me. 

Of course, these days, the one filmmaker who is most-synonymous with documentaries is Michael Moore. But another equally-heralded filmmaker is still producing them. She is Barbara Kopple, a two-time Best Documentary Academy Award winner for HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A. in 1977 and AMERICAN DREAM in 1991. In HOT TYPE: 150 YEARS OF THE NATION, Kopple explores the history and the liberal journalistic spirit of The Nation, America’s oldest continuously published weekly magazine. The issues that The Nation have tackled across the decades are noted, and its present-day editors and writers are interviewed.

While watching HOT TYPE..., I only could ask myself: Is this a film about dedicated reporters who are focused on “journalism as a public good,” on dealing with the “big issues hitting ordinary people”? Certainly, this appears to be Kopple’s intention but, given our present cultural climate, there are those who would view The Nation’s staffers as Eastern elitists who are sorely out of touch with the American mainstream. This begs a question: Are today’s media powerhouses too New York and Washington DC-centric? And if so, are these media powerhouses wrapped in their own insulated cocoons?

At one point, Kopple films The Nation staffers on Election Day evening in 2012, during which there is much celebrating over President Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney. Still, one must wonder: What might have been there for her to film during the just-concluded election?

Plenty of documentaries also chart the lives of a range of individuals. Some are at their core issue-oriented. For example, HOOLIGAN SPARROW, directed by Nanfu Wang, spotlights Ye Haiyan, who has been labeled a troublemaker by the Chinese government for the “crime” of publicly protesting the civil rights of sex workers. Her plight is a vital reminder of the importance of journalistic and artistic freedom.

Then there is Alex Winter’s DEEP WEB, which explores the arrest and conviction of Ross William Ulbricht, AKA “Dread Pirate Roberts,” the administrator of Silk Road, the notorious online black market website. DEEP WEB reflects on how this case raises issues about privacy, surveillance, and the infringement on constitutional rights that are difficult to protect in our Internet age.

However, the one doc that really struck me is IVERSON, directed by Zatella Beatty, a multifaceted portrait of Allen Iverson, the talented, complex, forever-controversial basketball star. Now of course, depending upon the specifics of the story being told, not all documentaries are produced with the assistance of their subjects. But in this film Allen Iverson is interviewed and he discusses everything from his family background and the poverty that engulfed his childhood to the positive influences in his life, his dazzling athleticism on the court, and his issues off the court.

These issues just begin with his spending time in jail while still in high school in Virginia for reasons that, according to what is presented here, have more to do with Southern-style racism than with any sort of criminality. So the question here is: Did the authorities want to make an example of Iverson solely because he is black and a gifted athlete? With this in mind, another documentary-- 13TH, directed by Ava DuVernay and available on Netflix-- is a powerful slap-in-the-face look at the present-day mass-incarceration of black-American males.     

But getting back to IVERSON: This film is not just a portrait of a celebrated athlete, and it is more than the story of Allen Iverson. It transcends sports and, like 13TH, it is a mirror of race in 21st-century America.

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